This special issue includes a selection of papers presented at the 12th International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Application (ISBRA), which was held at Belorussian State University in Minsk, Belarus on June 5-8, 2016. The ISBRA symposium provides a forum for the exchange of ideas and results among researchers, developers, and practitioners working on all aspects of bioinformatics and computational biology and their applications. In 2016, 77 papers were submitted in response to the call for papers, out of which 22 extended abstracts appeared in the ISBRA proceedings published as volume 9683 of Springer Verlag’s Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics series. A small number of authors were invited to submit extended versions of their symposium papers to this special issue out of which 8 papers were selected for publication. Selected papers illustrate range of research topics from protein classification to next-generation sequencing and evolutionary analysis. They convincingly demonstrate the central role played by computational methods in nanobioscience research which will only increase in the future.